Slade Gorton: The man who took on Frank Zappa – and Don Rumsfeld

Former Sen. Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 commission, is greeted at CityClub, where he spoke about the panel's findings.

Former Sen. Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 commission, is greeted at CityClub, where he spoke about the panel's findings.

Photo: Dan DeLong, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Photo: Dan DeLong, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Former Sen. Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 commission, is greeted at CityClub, where he spoke about the panel's findings.

Former Sen. Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 commission, is greeted at CityClub, where he spoke about the panel's findings.

Photo: Dan DeLong, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Slade Gorton: The man who took on Frank Zappa – and Don Rumsfeld

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The 51-year political career of ex-U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton is neatly illustrated by a pair of great face-offs: his Senate set-to with rock musician Frank Zappa at a 1985 hearing, and a 9/11 Commission face-off in 2004 with then-Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld.

The episodes help make a new biography, "Slade Gorton: A Half-Century in Politics," not only instructive but a damn fine read. Our state historian John Hughes is dealing with a politician oft described as cold -- Gorton's gaunt appearance inspired the nickname "Skeletor" -- but in reality a white-hot interrogator.

A group of influential Washington, D.C., wives -- led by Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, wife of the then-treasury secretary -- set out to convince the music industry to offer parents guidance on often-obscene lyrics in rock albums. The Senate Commerce Committee responded with a hearing on "porn rock."

Zappa, following Gore and Baker to the witness stand, zapped "bored Washington housewives." He recited the First Amendment, and denounced the proposed music warnings as "the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation" and "an ill-conceived piece of nonsense" that infringed on civil liberties and invited litigation.

After Al Gore pandered to Zappa, Gorton showed why he garnered another nickname -- "Slade the Blade" -- back home in this Washington. He snapped:

"I can only say that I found your statement to be boorish, incredibly and insensitively insulting to the people who were here previously; that you can manage to give the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States a bad name, if I felt that you had the slightest understanding of it, which I do not."

Gorton told Zappa he might be held in contempt of Congress for his defiant attitude. "Go ahead," Zappa snarled back. "I already hold you in contempt."

Gorton was gone from the U.S. Senate by 2004, but sat on the Presidential 9/11 Commission (reluctantly named by George W. Bush) which probed why successive administrations ignored and failed to read warning signals of an upcoming terrorist attack on the United States. The imperious Rumsfeld appeared as a witness.

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

Gorton ticked off those signals, from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center's garage, to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, to the attack on the destroyer Cole, to Osama bin Laden's declaration of war.

Rumsfeld gave a long-winded response about knowing "precious little" about terrorist groups in Afghanistan and the length of time the Bush administration believed it needed to get up to speed.

"Well, Mr. Secretary, that's a good answer. But it isn't an answer to the question that I asked," Gorton, his fellow Republican, shot back.

"The question that I asked you was: What made you think, even when you took over and got these first briefings, given the history of al-Qaida and its successful attacks on Americans, that we had the luxury of even seven months before we could make any kind of response, much less three years?"

Gorton -- an early Bush backer in the 2000 campaign -- would conclude, as Hughes writes, that "the Bush White House thought it had 'all the time in the world' to deal with al-Qaida, as if Osama bin Laden and his wily operatives were just 'a bunch of people off in a cave.'"

Hughes isn't just writing history; Gorton is still making history. The biography discusses Gorton's central role in a memorable 1971 Olympia redistricting standoff. Two of the combatants, Gorton and Democrat Dean Foster, are members of the 2011 State Redistricting Commission.

A curious hostility prevails, notably on liberal websites, toward the movers and shapers of modern Washington. Ridicule greets references to Sens. Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson, or Gov. Dan Evans. It is as if history began when the self-absorbed blogger moved here from Sugarland, Texas, or Philadelphia.

Nonsense! The state has moved and needed movers. Washington has grown from a remote hewer of wood and hydroelectric producer, to a major manufacturing center (airplanes, plutonium, aluminum), to a technology center and home to entities seeking dominion in the global marketplace (Microsoft, Amazon.com, Starbucks).

Slade Gorton ranks, in his long political career, as both a force for progress and source of division. He is cerebral, a man whose head is often buried in a book. "He's not a schmoozer," wife Sally tells Hughes.

He is, as Hughes relates, a tough-as-nails negotiator and blunt truth-teller -- a man easier to admire than to love.

Gorton reached across the Pacific to find buyers who would not move the Seattle Mariners. The senator was invited to toss out the first ball the following April, prompting John Keister of KING/5's "Almost Live" to quip, "His throw was accurate but his face scared some of the younger children."

An angry President Reagan reportedly broke a pencil in two during a White House meeting at which Gorton lectured the Gipper on how tax cuts coupled with a defense buildup were producing record deficits.

A longtime critic of Indian treaty rights, Gorton was "our toughest opponent," Ron Allen, former president of the National Congress of American Indians, tells Hughes. "He made us better, smarter and more savvy." (Allen directed money from Indian Country that helped oust Gorton from the Senate.)

Gorton cut a deal to give Washington a top-flight federal judge, and never fathomed the outrage it generated. He cast a deciding Senate vote to confirm an unqualified right-wing lawyer to a federal appellate court, in exchange for Reagan's agreement to nominate Seattle trial attorney Bill Dwyer to the U.S. District Court bench in Seattle.

He could contradict, and often did.

Gorton became a "chainsaw populist," in Hughes' words, after Judge Dwyer's spotted owl ruling that halted logging in national forests. Gorton became a voice for Forks loggers; the Dartmouth and Columbia Law grad let industry lobbyists help draft a bill to "reform" the Endangered Species Act.

Chainsaw populism earned him a place on environmentalists' "Dirty Dozen" list of lawmakers. At the same time, however, Gorton was directing $200 million to buy up private land in the Interstate 90 corridor and serving as a key architect of the Mountains-to-Sound Greenway.

While a member of the Senate's Republican leadership, Gorton was the lone GOP senator to champion tighter fuel-efficiency standards for new cars and sport utility vehicles. He had to be excused from meetings when Senate Republicans plotted how to stall fuel efficiency legislation.

Hughes is admiring of his subject. He notes that after two painful Senate re-election losses -- in 1986 and 2000 -- Gorton snapped back. He made a Senate comeback in 1988, and has become an extremely valuable 21st century citizen.

Gorton, at 83, keeps going, from his early morning runs to his service on a wide variety of panels. He was a deeply engaged and productive member of the 9/11 Commission, and became a scathing critic of BP's corporate culture after serving on a Baker-chaired panel that probed a 2005 refinery explosion that killed 14 workers.

He was, as state attorney general in the late 1960s, an early employer of women lawyers, and four decades later an early backer of two Republican women elected to Congress: Reps. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers and Jaime Herrera Beutler.

Gorton has no reason to be objective, telling his biographer: "I've had an absolutely marvelous life."

Columnist Joel Connelly has written about politics for the P-I since 1973.